From Word To Word

There is something ideal about the pace of the simmering pot, the tomato sauce, the soup stock, the reduction, the jam, that rests on the back of the stove, hovering on the edge of my attention as I attend to my other tasks.  Simmering gives a kind of unity to the day or even to the hour, something to which I keep returning, to stir briefly, to taste and smell, or to add some missing ingredient.  It is the setting or the scenery that provides the mood and the rhthym for the narrative of my other activities. It is like music on the stereo or weather through the window. My life is played out over what is simmering in the pot.

Earlier this afternoon I posted on Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think“, an article that discusses the future of information technology from the perspective of a scientist in 1945.  It was for me one of those fabulous little discoveries that are the product of actually reading the web, and it has many elements that I would like to discuss beyond what I will be able to say in this and the previous post, but I will just strongly encourage people to read it for themselves and let these two posts be sufficient.

My favourite portion of Bush’s essay comes from the section where he is imagining a machine that might in the future enable people to manage what would essentially be digital libraries. The machine he imagines is very much like the personal computer, and the management system he imagines is like a personal internet, complete with hyperlinks, which he calls associative indexing and understands to be a more linear set of associations between texts.  These texts are all joined by a set of keywords, something like a tag system, and the texts can be joined by these words into any number of trails or paths through the mass of information that is the virtual library.

He then describes the function of the researcher in this new made of reading and writing, saying, “There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master [will become], not only his additions to the world’s record, but [...] the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

I love the metaphor of the trailblazer here, and its connotations have much to recommend it, so I cannot resist applying it in the context of the internet, which Bush only partially foresees.  The trailblazer is one who identifies a trail by leaving visible marks or blazes along the way.  The path that is marked is not necessarily the only one, because the choices of the trailblazer are to a certain extent personal and idiosyncratic, but in every case there is left a definite trail, leading from one point to another in order to facilitate others in making the same journey. Further, the word ‘blaze’ is from the same root as the word ‘blazon’, which means, in heraldic terms, a personal mark or arms that identifies the bearer.  Incorporating both senses, the trail-blazer is the one who marks a path for others to follow and who marks it with a sign that identifies the one who has made it.

In terms of the internet, I imagine a way for people to mark their paths through the web, not just the random wanderings that they happen to make as they explore the forest, but the habitual and useful paths that they discover by means of these wanderings, the pathways that might enable others to walk behind them.  Just as with a physical path, these digital pathways would never be essential or absolute.  Quite the opposite, because they would also identify the one who had made them, they would always be recognizable as a personal and idiosyncratic trail, but one that the trailblazer found valuable enough to mark and to share.

I do not know if the technology to do something like this exists already, but it should.  It should be possible for me to establish my own trails, my own links through the web, rather than relying on the links that others have made for me.  It should be possible for me to share these trails with other people and to follow the trails that others have made.  It should be possible for me, not merely to track where I have been, but to track my favourite paths, to take others along these paths with me, and to have others, even those I may never meet, follow the blazes that I have left behind me. These things should be possible because, as Bush’s argument implies, in a world as full of information as ours is, contributing to knowledge has as much to do with finding ways through the information as it has to do with adding to it.

I came across an essay yesterday as I was reading the web: “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945.  Bush’s central concern in the article is to encourage scientists, who had worked so well together in support of the war effort, to continue their collaboration in more peaceful endeavours, particularly in the area of information technologies, which he predicts will become increasingly significant.  While he is unable, of course, to foresee the exact technologies that will enable the rapid changes in human relationships to information, he is remarkably perceptive in his understanding that these changes will produce a continual reduction in the size of information, a rise in technical languages to facilitate this reduction, the introduction of artificial information readers to make this reduced information humanly readable, and the use of recording technologies in cybernetic ways, among other things.

The article is worth reading as a whole, not least because it provides such an interesting insight into how the immanent information revolution was beginning to appear even in 1945, but I want to focus on a single phrase, by no means central to the essay, but interesting to me nevertheless.  Midway through the article, in a section focussing on the processes that occur between data collection and the production of new knowledge, Bush says, “For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.”

What I think is interesting here is not the idea that creative thought or even mature thought, however Bush would define this, might be performed by a machine, which is now a science fiction commonplace, but the idea that the functions of the machine might be considered a substitution for these kinds of human thinking.  Here, as with some of his other predictions, I think that Bush is not a little prescient.  Whether or not he recognizes what he is predicting, he correctly projects that machines would not only perform the function of human thinking but become a substitute for that thinking as such.

Let me clarify the distinction I am making.  It is one thing to have a machine that is capable of performing certain kinds of thought.  It is another thing to have a machine begin to substitute for that kind of thought entirely, to perform it so effeciently that human thought ceases to perform this kind of thinking on its own because it allows itself to become substituted by the machine and dependent on the machine to perform these modes of thought in its place. For example, it is now the case, not only that calculators are capable of solving complex mathematical functions for me, but that they have replaced the necessity for me to do so, and have therefore replaced the necessity for me to learn to do so.  The calculator has become, for most people, an absolute substitute for complex, or even not so complex, mathematical calculation.

This is not the only example of this phenomenon, of course. I might also talk about the grammar and spelling checkers that are now a part of virtually every textual interface that I use, and there are many other examples as well.  The post interesting extension of this idea to me, however, is how the mode of thinking that has before now been called research has become increasingly performed by machines, almost by necessity, and has increasingly come to substitute for my own thinking in this mode.  Google is the obvious example in this respect, but there are many others, one or more for almost every digital task that I perform, from searching the files on my own computer to searching routes on my GPS map system.  The increase in data that digitization permits has necessitated machine search, and this in turn has forced me to abdicate my own thinking, at least in certain ways.

This is significant, I think, because there are many ways, many systems, many processes by which I might conduct my research, and these different approaches are completely capable of arriving at different results.  So much is obvious.  It should also be obvious that the range of research approaches available to me are limited by the tools that I use, along with other things, like disciplinary conventions and existing methods for organizing and cataloguing information.  To some extent, therefore, the mode of thinking that is operative in research has always been limited, but it has not until now become substituted like it has become substituted by the search engine.

Virtually all research now begins through the search engine.  It is the only practical place to begin in the face of the vast amounts of information now available to the researcher. Yet, search engines are coded to produce results according to certain criteria, most of which remain hidden from the researcher, and many of which are not helpful to serious research.  To use Google again as the obvious example, the ranking of pages based upon the number of links to them and other such quantitative criteria produces a list of hits that is based more on popularity rather than on utility for any particular purpose.  This kind of approach obviously privileges sites that are longstanding, easy to understand, visually appealing, or associated with powerful offline interests, rather than those that are most accurate or most thorough.  While there are many exceptions to this privilege, and while there are ways to refine searches to make them more reflective of other criteria, it remains that the structure of the search engine itself has begun to perform the thinking of research as well as the function, has begun to substitute for this kind of thinking for most people.

Again, none of this is profound.  Many have remarked at how scholars today have become more data miners and data analysts than researchers properly speaking, and this shift probably reflects a felt need resulting from the sheer amount of data that is being produced.  What it means to me, however, is that we need to start thinking critically about the kinds of programs, scripts, and algorythyms that produce our data.  To the degree that we allow machine thinking to substitute for human thinking, and this substitution is becoming increasingly unavoidable in many areas, it is imperative that we cede these modes of thought with caution and with a constant critical attention to the codified assumptions on which machine thinking is based.  We need to maintain an awareness of the limits and the limitations of the thinking that machines are performing for us, even as we take advantage of the possibilities that this thinking enables.  In some cases, we may also need to find alternative ways, either traditional or innovative, to counteract these limitations. To do otherwise is to risk limiting our thinking in ways that are intellectually dangerous.

I am not a birder, not in the sense that Dave Humphrey has described in a recent post, where the bird watcher is the one who is always watching.  I need nature to be a little less subtle before I realize that I need to be watching.  This past week at camp, it managed to be sufficiently blunt.

Outside of the main lodge at our camp is a covered pad that we call the breezeway, for the very good reason that it funnels the predominant wind and creates air movement even on the stillest and hottest of days.  This is where people congregate after breakfast to drink their coffee and chat before the day’s programming, which is also often held on the breezeway when the weather is good.  This year, we were joined by a pair of barn swallows that had made their nest behind one of the emergency lights on the ceiling, sheltered from the rain and protected from predators but completely unavoidable to the human population of the camp, even to someone as blind to these things as I am.  Each morning we were treated to the sight of the adults winging between the trees, circling the pillars, and swooping beneath the ceiling as they performed the interminable task of feeding their young.

As remarkable as this aeronautical display was, it was the chicks that I found most interesting, or, more precisely, it was the development of the chicks into fledglings and then into independent juveniles.  I am not sure when they were hatched, but when we saw them first on the Monday morning, they were still just bits of fluff that could be barely seen above the nest.  On Wednesday, they were already sitting the edge of the nest, and there were feathers poking through the fuzz, which would periodically be dislodged by the adults and drift to the ground below.  On Friday morning, the first fledgling left the nest, and all five were flying with the parents by evening, distinguishable from their parents only by size.  When we left on Saturday afternoon, the nest was empty.

What struck me about this maturation process was not merely how quickly it took place, but that it took place in exactly the week that I was there, in a place that I could not avoid seeing every morning, as if it was somehow being enacted just for me.  I felt like I had been made, without any intention of my own, an audience for a performance, but a performance that had nothing of the performative about it, an absolutely naive performance. The performers did not know themselves as such.  Nor did they know me for their audience.  They acted only according to their instinct, but to me, the audience they had unsuspectingly created, they told a story that was more simple and beautiful and compelling than anything I had ever seen on a stage.

In this respect, they were capable of something that will always be impossible for me.  I will never be able to live the performance of my life in this niave and unsuspecting way.  I will always know myself to be a performer.  I will always know that there is an audience, even if it is only myself.  My story will never attain to this kind of simplicity and naivity, however much I may wish to the contrary.  This impossibility ensures that my story, and all human stories, are essentially tragic, ensures that human stories are by definition the only stories capable of tragedy.  Perhaps this is why I was so captivated by the swallows and by their performance, because it was a story that neither invited nor avoided tragedy, but one that was entirely and essentially innocent of it.  No human story can hope for this kind of innocence.